GOD is a whale of a storyteller. From the Garden of Eden to the Great Flood to the resurrection of Christ, He’s got the best material. So, it’s no wonder that religious themes have dominated the arts for centuries, from the first fireside odes to the new film Exodus: Gods and Kings.
Yet, in Hollywood, where the prevailing god is called Moolah, Bible stories have drifted in and out of fashion. After World War II, when the movie industry was threatened by an infidel called television, the studios responded with big-screen religious epics: Samson and Delilah, The Robe, The Greatest Story Ever Told. In The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, square-jawed Charlton Heston was the embodiment of Christian might. Adjusted for inflation, Ben-Hur is still among the top 20 box-office hits, and no film has bested its total of 11 Academy Awards.
In the iconoclastic 1960s, religion receded from movie theaters. One of the biggest hits of the 1970s was The Exorcist, which expressed the battle between good and evil in R-rated terms and left its priestly protagonists dazed and confused.
In the new millennium, religious films have returned to theaters with a vengeance. For that, we can credit Mel Gibson. The star of the Mad Max movies was raised in a conservative Catholic home that rejected modern refinements, such as the English-language Mass.
At the height of his Hollywood success, Gibson bet heavily on his dream project, a violent recreation of Christ’s crucifixion, in the authentic Aramaic language of the era.
When the studios declined to distribute the film, Gibson did it himself, and, in 2004, The Passion of the Christ became the most profitable independent film ever. Gibson’s direct-marketing strategy enlisted the clergy to evangelize for the film. Although it didn’t pan out for the uncompleted Chronicles of Narnia series, the strategy is still employed today. Recent faith-based movies, such as Son of God, Heaven is For Real and God’s Not Dead, have successfully bypassed the traditional publicity apparatus—such as screenings for critics—to preach directly to the choir. (Evidently, it doesn’t matter to the distributors that Kirk Cameron’s new film Saving Christmas is literally the worst-reviewed movie in history, according to the web site Rotten Tomatoes.)
Ever mindful of the marketplace, Hollywood took note of the faith phenomenon and raised the stakes. Earlier this year Darren Aronofsky’s big-budget Noah was supposed to satisfy faithful and film-buff audiences alike. But its break-even performance at the box office left Hollywood hanging.
And now there is Exodus, Ridley Scott’s bigger-budget take on The Ten Commandments. British actor Christian Bale, best known as the dark avenger Batman, plays the Jewish emancipator Moses. The effects, as expected, are spectacular. Yet, any religious message is relegated to the background. We never even hear a recitation of the Ten Commandments that Moses carefully carves into stone.
Will history remember Exodus as one of the great religious-themed movies? God only knows.
THE 10 BEST RELIGIOUS MOVIES
1. Bedazzled (1967). Hapless cook Stanley (Dudley Moore) sells his soul to the devil (Peter Cook) in order to win true love. But the seven deadly sins (including Raquel Welch as lust) stand in the way.
2. Ben-Hur (1959). Like Barabbas, this sword-and-sandals epic is only indirectly about Christ, but, as the Jewish slave, who stands tall against the Romans, brawny charioteer Charlton Heston is a muscle-bound missionary.
3. Dogma (1999). In Kevin Smith’s irreverent comedy, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck play avenging angels, Linda Fiorentino is a reluctant messiah who works at an abortion clinic, George Carlin is a priest who promotes the new “Buddy Christ” line of artifacts, and Alanis Morissette is God. Who could be offended?
4. Into Great Silence (2007). For six months, director Philip Goring lived among silent monks in the French Alps. The result is a documentary that, like the Gothic monastery itself, is as meditative as a Buddhist temple and as beautifully lit as a Vermeer painting.
5. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Yes, this Christmas classic about a smalltown businessman bullied by a rich rival is a critique of capitalism, but don’t forget that God is the referee and that a guardian angel comes to the rescue of hard-working Jimmy Stewart, even after he admits he’s not a praying man.
6. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Entire shelves of research are dedicated to the human side of Jesus Christ, but, when Willem Dafoe portrayed him as a flawed and tempted man, fundamentalists cast plenty of stones.
7. Life of Brian (1979). In this Monty Python comedy, a Nazarene, who is born in the stable next to Jesus, is mistaken for the messiah, joins the People’s Front of Judea and takes a joyride on a spaceship. Just like in the Bible.
8. Oh, God! (1977). George Burns is a wisecracking Almighty, and grocery clerk John Denver is his messenger to the masses. As in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Teri Garr is the put-upon wife.
9. A Serious Man (2009). For the Coen brothers, life is a joke, and, here, they toss a banana peel under the feet of a Jewish physicist, whose wife is cheating on him and whose rabbi offers nothing but platitudes.
10. Wadjda (2012). An irrepressible 10-year-old Saudi girl enters a school contest for memorizing the Quran so she can use the prize money to buy a bicycle. The first feature film directed by a Saudi woman, it uses the self-propelled two-wheeler as a metaphor for freedom.
Joe Williams / Saint Louis Post-Dispatch